IP Counsel, Patents

About Anthropic

Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

About the role

We are seeking an experienced and strategic IP Counsel to join our growing legal team. In this role, you will provide comprehensive IP guidance across the organization, with particular depth in patent strategy. You will work closely with our product, research, and technical teams to drive Anthropic's organic patent portfolio development while also advising on the full spectrum of IP matters. You will partner closely with the Head of IP and other IP legal colleagues to help design and implement an IP program that protects Anthropic's innovations, supports the company's growth, and is aligned with the company’s mission.

Responsibilities:

• Drive our organic patent development process, including invention harvesting, drafting oversight, prosecution management, and coordination with outside counsel
• Develop and implement comprehensive patent strategies in the U.S. and internationally that align with Anthropic's business objectives and technology roadmap
• Provide broad IP guidance across the organization, with the ability to identify and address potential IP issues across patents, trademarks, trade secrets, and open source
• Analyze and respond to third-party patent demands, and evaluate strategic patent acquisition and licensing opportunities
• Conduct IP due diligence for M&A transactions and strategic partnerships
• Advise on IP aspects of commercial agreements, including licenses, joint development agreements, and technology transfers, educating technical teams on best practices to protect Anthropic's innovations

You may be a good fit if you have:

• A JD and active membership in at least one U.S. state bar (California preferred) and registration with the USPTO
• 10+ years of legal experience with demonstrated expertise across the IP spectrum particularly in patents
• Strong experience working directly with engineers, researchers, and product teams to identify and protect innovations
• Track record of developing and implementing comprehensive IP strategies in fast-moving technical environments
• Experience balancing legal protection with business practicality in a collaborative setting

Strong candidates may have:

• Advanced degree in computer science, engineering, or related technical field 
• Deep expertise in IP areas beyond patents
• Experience in AI, machine learning, or related cutting-edge technologies 
• Background in high-growth technology companies or startups

Application Deadline: June 1, 2025. Applications will be reviewed after the deadline, and our hiring team plans to begin contacting potential candidates shortly after. We encourage all interested and qualified applicants to submit their materials before this date to ensure full consideration.

Role-specific policy: For this role, we expect all staff to be able to work from our San Francisco office at least 3 days a week, though we encourage you to apply even if you might need some flexibility for an interim period of time.

The expected salary range for this position is:

Annual Salary:$300,000—$375,000 USD

Logistics

Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.

Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.

Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed.  Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.

How we're different

We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At Anthropic we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts. And we value impact — advancing our long-term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI — rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science, which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. We're an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly value communication skills.

The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to Anthropic, including: GPT-3, Circuit-Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences.

Come work with us!

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues.